Aardman Co-Founder David Sproxton's Tips for Success in the Animation Industry, Part 1 (of 3): 3 Pre-Production Tips

Aardman founders David Sproxton (left) and Peter Lord (right) standing in front of Wallace & Gromit set for Variety (Photo by Charlie Gray)

“It all started at a kitchen table,” says co-founder of Aardman Animations, David Sproxton, about the beginning of his career in animation, “Pete [Peter Lord] and I met as schoolkids….Pete and I got to be great mates and we started playing and thinking up stories. I was always interested in photography and kind of, I guess, the process thing about films….One day we got out the Bolex, stuck it up on a stand and actually just cut images out of color supplements. We’d obviously watched programs like Vision On, which obviously used a plethora of styles. Cut out is the easiest thing to do. We didn’t really understand cel animation or actually how you drew stuff. We just moved stuff around and did stuff with chalk drawings.”

Earlier this year, Aardman, in celebration of the 40th anniversary of their studio, released a conversation with David Sproxton that follows-up an earlier interview with Watershed’s Mark Cosgrove that was released in 2010. These mini-documentaries – cheekily dubbed “Aardocs” – intercut Sproxton’s interview with video clips from their earlier projects and behind-the-scenes featurettes, following the narrative thread of Aardman Animations, from its founding “at a kitchen table” to the studio’s incredible growth – both size of crew and popularity with the general public with Aardman-made characters such as Morph – to their award-winning short films, commercials, and music videos, all the way to their plunge into feature films in the late-90s/early-2000s to the worldwide phenomena of Shaun the Sheep and their other original characters.

The mini-documentaries provide an unprecedented look at the studio from Sproxton’s viewpoint whose advice is invaluable and easily transposable to the lives of animators, and all-around creatives in the animation and filmmaking industry today.

Below I’ve listed three of 10 or so tips that I learned from watching the documentaries, the rest of which I plan to publish on the blog very soon. As a general theme, this post covers Sproxton’s most helpful advice in the realm of pre-production. Thus, following with that theme, I imagine I’ll do three posts in the end – one on his advice on pre-production, one on production, and one on post-production and other, non-categorical tips.

1. Keep a sketchpad at hand and write down all your ideas, no matter how underdeveloped they may be.

The first “note from Sproxton’s book,” as it were, that we’re going to take actually happens to be both a figurative and literal note from Wallace & Gromit, Chicken Run, and 2018’s Early Man creator Nick Park’s notebook. As it happens, this note comes in the form of Park’s notebook itself.

If there’s anything Nick Park does, Sproxton assures Mark Cosgrove, he jots down his ideas, often in the form of sketches in his notebook.

A still from Wallace & Gromit: The Wrong Trousers

As Sproxton says to Cosgrove, “What’s lovely about the three original [Wallace & Gromit] shorts was that you see the genesis of the next film actually in the previous one. In Grand Day Out there are pictures of sheep on the wall and that led eventually to A Close Shave. And it’s quite fun. There are ideas that track through Nick’s mind for many, many years. There’s key images.” So it should come as no surprise that the very first thing that Nick’s writing collaborator – Doctor Who writer Bob Baker – did at the forefront of helping Park write The Wrong Trousers – Wallace and Gromit’s second cinematic outing. As Sproxton puts it, “What Bob did was basically get Nick to a., open up his sketchbook, and b., empty all his ideas out on the table. And they were random. They were discrete ideas which weren’t really joined up and Bob said, ‘Well, if you shuffle them in this order, clearly there’s a villain, there’s a diamond. It’s a heist movie. He’s the villain. You got this picture of this penguin with a glove on his head. What’s that about? Well, he must be disguising himself, so he’s obviously trying to do something bad. What’s he hiding?’ And very quickly they put this spine of this film together. All the images, all the key images in the film are in Nick’s sketchbook from two or three years before he started making the movie. Bob just helped him sew the plot together and then work on the gags and the rest of it.”

As Sproxton states, it was a combination of two elements – firstly, Nick Park’s relatively random ideas and sketches and, secondly, his collaboration with an experienced professional (another tip that we’ll get to) – that was the genesis for the film that Steven Spielberg hailed as, “Possibly the greatest thirty minutes of animation ever made.” And, beyond that, the “sheep” that Sproxton mentions “became A Close Shave” also became the worldwide phenomena of Shaun the Sheep, which then spawned the popular children’s TV show Timmy Time.

Nick Park and Steve Box pouring over storyboards for Wallace & Gromit

There are ideas that track through Nick’s mind for many, many years. There’s key images.

So, in short, write down your ideas. All of them. Write. Sketch. Jot. Repeat.

2. When brainstorming and writing your film, keep the visual end product at the forefront of your mind. Use the tool of storyboarding as a major element of the writing and development process.

This piece of advice is historically somewhat divisive among filmmakers. Live-action filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino and Steven Spielberg preach just the opposite approach – that filmmaking should be a process of transposing and translating a script into visuals which then become the final film. Sproxton’s advice suggests doing just the opposite, especially for working on an animated feature film.

Aardman's story reel for a scene in The Pirates!

“Going back to that first stage of developing the story and the ideas – because I guess you’ve got to start in the same place: with a good story – how were both Arthur Christmas and Pirates! then from the ideas to developing them into feature films? How was that process?” Poses Cosgrove to Sproxton. Readjusting his position in his seat, Sproxton answers him, “So that process – the process of development – you will have a written script. And it’s quite interesting because Sony came from a much more script-based background than DreamWorks did. DreamWorks would go to drawings and storyboards relatively early-on in the process. They might say, ‘Actually, that first draft works pretty well. It’s good enough to storyboard. Let’s start making it into a story-reel.’ Sony wanted more refined scripts. They wanted 90-100 pages pretty tight. So, you’d spend some time getting the story right which is a good thing to do. The weird thing is is that the real making of the nuts and bolts of the story actually happen at the storyboarding process and the story reel. In other words, putting those storyboard images into a timeline and editing that. And that’s when you really get to grips with it, because that’s where you see how the pacing is working, how the character relationships are working. And so a lot of what was in the original written script actually changes or may get chucked out totally. I think DreamWorks had learnt that it’s pointless working for months and months and months on a beautifully crafted, 100-page script because, actually, when you get to the storyboarding process, a lot of it is going to go out the window for the right reasons. So once you get to the point where the fundamentals of this story work – the structure works, the character beats are broadly working – now let’s get down to the detail and let’s just do that in drawings. So that process we probably allow almost a year-and-a-half for and typically, I think on Pirates!, I think they drew something like 55,000 storyboard images, of which there’d be maybe 6-7,000 in the final story reel. So that demonstrates the rate at which you’re making changes all the way through.”

However, there’s a danger to following the above DreamWorks/Aardman process of working on a film in storyboard version. It’s the same danger that writers are at risk when they rewrite and rewrite their story over and over to a point where the final product is completely unrecognizable from the first draft.

I think DreamWorks had learnt that it’s pointless working for months and months and months on a beautifully crafted, 100-page script because, actually, when you get to the storyboarding process, a lot of it is going to go out the window for the right reasons.

On the above point, Sproxton reiterates, “Michael Salter who we worked with a lot said that on Curse of the Were-Rabbit there were something like 24,000 storyboard pictures that he and his small team drew. Now, in the final story-reel, which is these storyboard pictures put into an editing machine and running to the full length – 85 minutes or whatever it is – if you look at it, there’s a drawing every few seconds so you add up the number of drawings in the final story-reel and there’s going to be five or six thousand. Hang on. You said there were 24,000. ‘Yes. Every scene was rewritten and redrawn three or four times.’ You know, the directors have ideas. The board artists will have ideas. The bulk of the work you do doesn’t get used – it gets chucked out. So writing is rewriting and rewriting and rewriting. So out of those 24,000 storyboard images, only about 5,000 of them actually got into the final reel on which you then make the film. That becomes your blueprint for the movie.”

A page from Aardman's Chicken Run storyboard

As a side-note, there’s another school of thought – one that I haven’t touched upon yet – one that I would like to call the Wes Anderson school of thought.

The bulk of the work you do doesn’t get used – it gets chucked out. So writing is rewriting and rewriting and rewriting. So out of those 24,000 storyboard images, only about 5,000 of them actually got into the final reel on which you then make the film. That becomes your blueprint for the movie.

Wes Anderson has a very unique and a very interesting way of working on his films. His films, as I’ve often heard reiterated by many of the people who have worked on his films (specifically the likes of Bill Murry and William Defoe) is that Wes Anderson’s vision for a film is incredibility specific. Anyone who has ever read his scripts knows this. Wes Anderson does not think in words but instead thinks in pictures. The words he writes on the page are not meant to stand on their own, but are instead meant to be the blueprint to follow to create the visual images that the words suggest. Thus, for Fantastic Mr. Fox, on the side of the script Wes Anderson drew little stick-figure storyboard pictures that are visual representations of the words he put down. He then handed these rudimentary (and yet very specific) storyboards to professional storyboard artists who then recreated his images, only in more detail. Those storyboards were then handed back to Anderson, who took them and filmed himself playing each of the characters in the film. He then edited those video clips of him playing the various characters and saying all of the dialogue into the storyboards as animation reference for the animators. That story-reel was then handed to the animators along with a beat sheet, which they then animated with.

A page of the Fantastic Mr. Fox script displaying Wes Anderson's annotations from The Making of Fantastic Mr. Fox, which you can buy on Amazon by going here

The Wes Anderson school of thought is the one I subscribe to the most. The only caveat to this school of thought, however, is huge: you have to been a visual thinker. That is to say that, in order to utilize the Wes Anderson school of thought you must have a visual mind from the very outset – you have to have the ability to see the final product of whatever it is you’re making before you ever sit down to storyboard. Furthermore, a second caveat is that this workflow will only work if and when a project has a singular, specific creative vision at the outset. Because so many films are written and rewritten by essentially a committee, it isn’t hard to imagine why the last caveat would prohibit the vast majority of productions from having the ability to utilize this school of thought.

When working with a team, Sproxton’s method may work the best. Storyboarding early-on in a production is one of the most useful tools available to anyone attempting to make an animated feature because it is the visual blueprint for the film, and thus storyboards can be a much more helpful tool to create a film than a pristine script.

3. Collaboration is key. Don’t try to do everything yourself. Specialize in only one or two jobs on a production. Acknowledge your weaknesses and inabilities and collaborate with people who can make up for them.

The credits for David Sproxton and Peter Lord’s very first film read, “Dave: cameraman, lighting, cut-outs, make-up, start-trainer, producer; Pete: artist, animator, cut-outs, innovator, publicity, director.” “And those credits pretty well say it all,” says Sproxton.

Credits sequence for David Sproxton and Peter Lord's first film

It is a commonly known but little acknowledged point that, at some point, somebody, somewhere will be better at doing a task than you are, and they will enjoy performing that task more than you. Thus, as Sproxton says, it will ultimately be better for you and for your final film if you simply hire someone to perform a certain task instead of trying to do everything yourself. For David Sproxton, Peter Lord was his perfect creative counterpart: Lord enjoyed creating the things seen in front of the camera, whereas Dave enjoyed being the man behind the camera.

Credits sequence for David Sproxton and Peter Lord's first film

Another tip from Sproxton essentially boils down to this: find out what your strengths are by asking other what your strengths are and work on specializing in those skills. This advice can be found by retreading the story of how Nick Park wrote Wallace & Gromit: The Wrong Trousers – Peter Lord, David Sproxton, and Nick Park were all aware that Nick Park, to write the next Wallace & Gromit, would need help. To write the film, they brought on the writer Bob Baker. Whether it was as simple and quick a process as Sproxton makes it out to be is unknown, but what is known is that Baker knew how to write a story and how to write a story well. Thus, as Sproxton says, Baker helped Park put together the film. Once the script had been put together, Park and his small team at Aardman then took that script and collaborated to make the final product.

All the images, all the key images in the film are in Nick’s sketchbook from two or three years before he started making the movie. Bob just helped him sew the plot together and then work on the gags and the rest of it.

David Sproxton holding the character of Morph, one of Aardman's first characters (Photo by Matt Crockett)

You can go watch Sproxton’s original interview by going here.

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